ACORN was already in business , so it is very likely that there were thousands more ficticious persons on the rolls.
The problem with fraudulent registrations does not mean that ACORN was trying to commit fraud. I have had my phone service changed twice, once from my long distance carrier to another carrier, and once to add services to my account. I did not authorize the changes in either case, and promptly had them changed back to my original service. In the first case, a long distance provider hired a group to sign up new customers for them, and paid them according to the number of new customers they signed up; some wiseguy picked random names and numbers out of a phone book and filled out and signed the cards himself, to make more money. In the second case, someone my carrier hired to sell high speed internet service added it to my account without my approval; when I got a recorded message from the carrier thanking me for signing up, I immediately called and had it cancelled. The point is, it wasn't the carrier in either case that was committing fraud; it was the people they hired to do their recruiting and selling for them, who were trying to cheat the carriers by signing people up without their knowledge.
Does ACORN do the same thing, i.e., hire people to take registrations and pay them based on the number of registrations they get? If they check the registrations and find any that look fraudulent, are they required to submit them anyway (as I have heard)? Are they even required to check the registrations before they submit them to the state, or does the state take the responsibility for checking the validity of the registrations?
